Sermon — May 7, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, God’s own people.” (1 Peter 2:9)
If there’s one thing that human beings are really good at, it’s immediately picking up on the small signs that identify whether someone else is a member of a particular social group. In every decade, teenagers have been able to identify who’s young and who’s old by their ability to understand the meaning of simple words like “slay” or “lit,” “groovy” or “the cat’s pajamas,” depending on your generation. But adults can do this too. Most of us can tell you exactly what it means for someone to be carrying around a large regular iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts when it’s 45 degrees in May—namely, that you’re a New Englander, and probably not a tourist. Just the other week I turned and asked a colleague if she was a New Yorker when I heard her say the word “water,” and I’ll never forget the moment I heard Steve Spinetto say about three words the first time we met, and then asked him where exactly in Cambridge he’d grown up.
For one evolutionary reason or another, human beings are very good at distinguishing those who are in a particular group from those who are out. In fact, sometimes we’re too good at it. You might even say that this is the source of some of our biggest problems: our seeming inability to treat other people like human beings across some of these very visible dividing lines.
And at times, it seems the Bible doesn’t help. Our Gospel reading this morning includes a verse that’s often used to condemn the followers of other religions, when Jesus says, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) As Bishop Alan said in his homily at our Clergy Conference this week, this verse is the kind of thing that makes us cringe when we read it at funerals, as we often do, wondering who is sitting out there in the pews feeling as though we’re declaring that they’ve been cut off from God.
Likewise our epistle can often be read in an unfortunate way. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that Peter’s words have been twisted to disastrous effect during the history of the Church. Imagine the sermons that have been preached to white churches in apartheid South Africa or to slave-owners in the antebellum South or by nationalist priests in Russia right now, that have begun from the verse, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” (1 Peter 2:9) We all hear these words as if they were addressing us. And because the common Civil-Rights-era saying that “11 o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America” remains as true now as it was seventy years ago, we have to reckon with the fact that right now, in hundreds and thousands of churches across this Commonwealth and across this country, all following the same lectionary, white preachers or readers are looking out over all-white or nearly-all-white congregations and saying to them, “You are a chosen race.”
But there’s a catch. And it’s an important catch. Because we are just not members of an American church, or an Episcopal church, or a mostly-white church. We are members of one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, the Church with a capital-C, the global, universal Church. And just as there are white preachers looking out over their congregations today all across America and saying, “You are a chosen race,” there are Black preachers looking out over their congregations, saying, “You are a chosen race.” Just as there are American preachers telling their congregations, “You are a holy nation,” there are priests across Latin America telling their people, “ustedes son una nación santa,” and clergy of many denominations around the world are the same thing to the people in their own countries. This very morning, in our one Episcopal diocese alone, there are people hearing these words who’ve been in Boston for ten generations and people hearing them who came here as refugees or immigrants just months or years ago, and they’re being read in English, Spanish, and Chinese; Swahili, and Dinka, and Luganda; and there are probably some I’m missing.
When Peter talks about a “chosen race,” it’s not “the white race” or “the Black race.” When he talks about a “holy nation,” it’s not the United States of America or the Russian Federation. As King Charles III knows better than anyone else, when Peter talks about “royal priesthood” he doesn’t mean the fact that the King of the United Kingdom doubles as Supreme Governor of the Church of England; he means that in Christ, a congregation of ordinary people who have been neither ordained nor crowned have been made into a royal priesthood, the holy people of God, and there is no one who has the authority to lord it over them and there is nobody who stands between them and God.
Peter doesn’t write this letter, like Paul writes his letters, to a particular congregation in a particular place. He begins it, “Peter, an apostle of Christ, to the exiles of the Diaspora in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” (1 Peter 1:1) He writes, in other words, to people who are not his people, not his tribe or nation or race, people who don’t even speak his native tongue; people who are not one people, but many, and who—and this is important—are not a majority gathered in their community, but tiny minorities, scattered and dispersed throughout the world. “Once you were not a people,” he writes, “but now you are God’s people,” (1 Peter 2:10) and it’s true. Through their shared faith in Christ, these tiny scattered groups, minorities within their communities, have been transformed into a new nation, a new people, whose identity is formed not so much by their language, or their location, or their nationality, but by their allegiance to Jesus, by the presence of the Holy Spirit of God, by their decision to follow what the Letter of James calls the “royal law”: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (James 2:8)
This isn’t something you can see in someone’s face. It isn’t something you can hear in their accent or their choice of words. Even the apostles can hardly recognize the presence of God, after all. It strikes me that in this very passage that can sometimes feel exclusive—“no one comes to the Father except through me”—Thomas says to Jesus, “Lord we do not know where you are going,” (John 14:5) and Philip makes a request that’s so completely missing the point (“Lord, show us the Father, and we’ll be satisfied”) that Jesus responds with dismay: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still don’t know me?” (John 14:8-9) Are you among my closest followers and you still have no idea at all what’s going on? How much more true is that for us, two millennia later, when we look at another person’s religion and claim that we can judge whether that’s of God or not. If even Thomas and Philip don’t know where Jesus is going or where God has been revealed, maybe we ought to just be humble, and not pretend that we know what God is doing in someone else’s life, even if they don’t seem to believe the same things we do.
What’s “chosen” about the “chosen race” is not that it’s one race that’s chosen; it’s that people are chosen from among all the races of the world. What’s holy about the “holy nation” is not that one nation is more holy than the rest, it’s that citizens from all the nations of the world, which all have their ups and downs, good and bad, have been formed into a new nation whose values are at odds with the values of the lands in which they dwell, whose way of self-sacrificing love of neighbor and of God sometimes overlaps with, but is ultimately incompatible with, the way of the world.
We are, and always have been, and always will be, a tiny fraction of the world. Jesus would say we’re like yeast, or like seeds, or like a few fish in the sea. And that’s our gift and our calling: not to separate ourselves from the world, as if the world were evil and we are good, but to love the world, because we hold dual citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven and the many kingdoms of the earth.
Every one of you is a “royal priest,” a holy leader who has the power to set an example for the world, and the power to share God’s love with the world and to share the world’s needs with God. You have the power to love the people around you, whoever they are and whatever that means. You have the power to pray for them, to care for them, to simply hold them in the light of God, and sometimes even to share with them a little bit of the story of how you ended up right here today. For “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9-10)